The last time we heard from Dutch fashion designer Antoine Peters he was busy reinventing the yak, a traditional 19th century Dutch garment, part of the regional dress of Zeeland, a province of the Netherlands.
Yet Peters can't stand still and loves moving between the past, the present and the future with interdisciplinary projects suspended between art and fashion. His latest adventure has recently been unveiled and it's a collaboration with filmmaker Oscar Verpoort. The latter is well known for producing various commercials, music and fashion videos, he is also the director of the critically acclaimed feature-length documentary about Dutch superstar DJ Armin van Buuren, and developed the television format MINDF*CK with illusionist Victor Mids that combines the art of magic with popular-science.
Peters and Verpoort have collaborated on a number of projects before and are always on the lookout for ways to let fashion and film interact together.
The result of their latest collaboration is a short film entitled "Hey, wait a minute!" that moves from Peters' Lenticular Dress 2.0. In the film a model is shown in a 360° perspective, though she stands still, the design she is wearing radically changes and so do the lights, make-up, sound and space surrounding her. From jet black, the geometrically pleated dress becomes a riot of colours, playing with the perceptions of the viewers and prompting them to wonder if that's a clever optical illusion recreated via digital means or if that's real.
The solution to this clever enigma? The dress is real and it's made with the lenticular technique Peters developed a while back, so as the observer and the wearer move, the colours change and mutate stimulating all the senses.
The dress was developed with a Japanese folding technique but there is actually a secret behind its colours – they were recreated by hand in an effort to develop further lenticular textiles. As Peters explains: "Originally I wanted the textile to be printed first and then folded, but that appeared to be impossible because textile stretches, printing on textile is never accurate to the ,millimeter and pleating is handicraft. Therefore, the fabric had to be colored in manually. It took several weeks and cramps in the fingers and back."
The dress transformation and colour changes are captured at their best with an experimental technique, an extreme slow-motion of more than 200 frames per second repeated endlessly.
Yet the project is not just about colours and optical illusions: the director and the fashion designer were indeed determined to shift the discourse towards human feelings. Verpoort states that "The Lenticular Dress shows several emotions in one dress", and Peters hopes that the garment will makes us ponder more about first opinions and taking away prejudices, a key issue especially in our modern society in perpetual transformation. "Our film tells the story of resilience, optimism and hope," he explains. "By means of delay, we want to appeal to the imagination of the viewer, comment the snap judgments of people and show that a deferred opinion will be different or at least more nuanced."
The film was launched as part of the 'Experiences' program during Amsterdam Fashion Week and was made accessible to the audience of the catwalk program.
Peters designed a limited edition sweater to accompany the project: the design features a precisely developed asymmetrical artwork derivative of the lenticular dress and reproduces its own optical illusion.
The sweater, available on Antoine Peters' site, encourages people to be fashionably-arty via a wearable product and it could be considered as another piece of Peters' personal colourful puzzle, a game he is playing against a fashion industry too focused on manufacturing irrelevant products that do not contribute to make the wearers happy, but only end up polluting the planet and clogging our wardrobes.
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